Whoa! A Poemato CX Fanfic!

Good old Crabbyrhys sent this my way recently. There’ve been silly little fanfic stories in the Poemato CX chat before, but this is the first actual full-fledged fanfic we’ve gotten… I think?

Anyway, the chat has a role in this fanfic, so have a read!

Tomato and Poe gazed at the barren, destroyed landscape in amazement. They had never seen anything like it before. Decaying, skeletal skyscrapers dominated the horizon as far as the eye could see, their presence a testament to the rise and fall of some great civilization. No life would be able to thrive on the scorched earth left behind after the cataclysm which reduced this once great city to rubble. Green and pink clouds raced through the sky, their odd color probably due to a palette limitation. The words “Level 6” appeared briefly and then vanished again.

“We did it!” Poe exclaimed, performing a celebratory floating twirl and then rustling her purple robes back into place. “Level 6! We’ve never been this far before!”

“Yeah,” Tomato said. He rocked back and forth approximately an eighth of an inch, a frenzy of joy for him.

They were playing The Adventures of Captain Spastic, a game of advanced age which was considered a classic by those who, as children, were unfortunate enough to not have any other games to play. Captain Spastic himself, the character controlled by the player throughout the game, had all the agility and maneuverability of a poorly hurled brick. He was able to wield two different weapons in his adventures, a gun which shot pellets across the screen and destroyed most enemies with five shots, and a flamethrower which shot a flame a measly character length and destroyed most enemies with four shots. The game designers appeared to take an almost perverse pleasure in placing the flamethrower “upgrade” in places where it was almost impossible to avoid, some enemies even attacking by throwing the flamethrower “upgrade” at Captain Spastic. Meanwhile the ray gun upgrades were often floating just out of reach, taunting and jeering at players who could only trudge on, dreaming of the day they might have the marginally better weapon.

As usual, Tomato and Poe were playing the game on their streaming channel while dozens of onlookers cheered them on, taking part in both the sorrows of defeat and the joys of victory. The dozens of onlookers were currently going absolutely bananas in the chat box, congratulating Tomato and Poe on their accomplishment and speculating on what was to come.

“So what are our goals for this next area?” Poe asked.

“Kill things.” Tomato said.

The dozens of onlookers supported the idea of killing things wholeheartedly with a flurry of messages that, among other things, detailed the optimal ways for killing things and reminisced about the ways the individuals had performed simulated killings in the past. Suddenly all the messages stopped and the chat box went dark, silencing all those virtual voices.

“Mato, what the heck happened?” Poe cried.

Tomato looked at the screen for a moment before proclaiming “Stream’s dead.”

“This is the eight time today the stream died. We need to do something about it!” Poe quivered in frustration, her yellow eyes flashing.

“Yeah,” Tomato said, and after a pause added “What?”

“Maybe you should try to kick the router,” Poe suggested. “That usually does something.”

“Okay,” Tomato said and rolled his red, spherical self over to where the modem and router were sitting on the floor. The router skittered across the ground when Tomato kicked it, ending its brief journey by striking a wall and cracking open like a piñata, if said piñata was shaped like a router and filled with a cheap circuit board.

“Mato! I didn’t mean you should actually kick the router!”

“That’s what you said.”

Poe made an exasperated gesture. “I meant kick it like reset it. That’s a word people use, right? Like, IT people will say I’m gonna go kick that router or the server needs kicking or whatever.”

“Dunno.”

“Oh man, now we have to go get a new one or we’ll never be able to finish this game!”

“Yeah.” Tomato thought for a moment. “I guess go to the store?”

“Sounds good,” Poe said cheerfully. “Let’s go!” She grabbed Tomato by the stem and dragged him outside.

Teraluxe was the name of the giant box store close to where Tomato and Poe lived. All the advertisements billed it as “A second Earth of shopping,” a nonsensical statement which nevertheless had a strong effect on the consumer population. The consumer population found themselves groping almost against their wills towards the nearest Teraluxe store, much like a flower will grope its way towards the sun. Whispered rumors in dark corners said that there was some sort of nefarious goings on at Teraluxe involving hypnotism and world domination, but that place has absolutely everything, those whispered rumors went on to say, and would you perhaps like me to pick you something up when I go there later?

“I really hate coming here,” Poe said. “This place is just too big, and there are too many people here.”

“Yeah,” Tomato said. “Got the map?”

“Right here.” Poe unfurled a map about four feet by three and started studying it. “Okay, we used entrance 5B, and we’re trying to get to zone 24NT. Looks like we need to go through this room, up this passage and then, uh, hm.”

“Bomb the wall?” Tomato suggested

“Yeah, this is probably a place where we have to bomb the wall. Man, this store is so confusing!”

Tomato and Poe moved through several rooms and hallways, all crammed full of shelves which were in turn crammed full of the debris of consumerism. Brightly colored bottles and packages screamed out for someone to purchase them, and the sight and sound of them were exhausting.